Guidance on purchasing a 2G internal hard drive

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jalfano85

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I want to purchase two SATA-6.0GB/s 2TB drives to run in RAID 1 for a new build I am doing. I had a question about choosing a drive. Thanks in advance for your help with this.

If I search for these drives on New Egg, the three most popular SATA-6.0GB/s 2TB drives (i.e. having more than 200 reviews) are as follows:

Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Western Digital WD Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive - OEM

Western Digital Red NAS Hard Drive WD20EFRX 2TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

In all three of these popular drives, about 20-25% of the reviews are one star, saying primarily that the drive did not work when they bought it or it failed very shorts after purchase.

I found this really surprising. Are hard drives really that unreliable these days? So if I buy two of these drives, do I really have nearly a 50% chance that one of these will not work when I get it? Or is it just that people who are satisfied with their drive don't post reviews and people with bad experiences do?

So basically I was wondering what people's experiences with hard drives are - do brand-new drives really not work as often as these reviews seem to suggest?

I really don't want to fight with bad hard drives and I'd be willing to pay a little more for reliability, but I can't seem to find a popular option that has a one-star rating significantly less than 20%.

Thanks for the help.

 
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ronintexas
Sorry for the late answer.

RAID should never be used in replacement for a backup. Even though the drives are "mirrored", if one fails, you aren't operational until it is replaced (you can leave the failed drive in, and access the data, but it will be very slow, and you may receive a lot of errors). RAID excels in the need for many spindles for large file servers, large databases, many users accessing data, and mission critical applications. For home use, the cost is usually prohibited, as you are spending 2X for a single drive. Backing up using SynchBack Free, you can choose how often you backup the data.

#2 - I would suggest using an ISO image of the SSD drive (you can store it on the backup drive), and periodically create a new...
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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I have purchased WD Black drives for years now - and all have worked perfectly from the time I purchased them until I retired them at 5-6 years of age (usually because the size of drives have so dramatically increased you want the larger sized drive) and repurpose them for another use.

I will make one suggestion. At work (I am an IT guy), I use RAID for mission critical application/storage servers, where I have several "backup" drives to replace when one fails, and I have to get the server back online quickly.

At home, I never use RAID. I have an OS drive (usually SSD), a data drive (usually WD Black 1TB or 2TB), and one backup drive (for the entire network - a 4TB WD Black). When a drive fails in RAID, until you get a replacement drive - you are down. No access to anything until the RAID array can be rebuilt. The backup drive gives me instant access to the data, and can be restored in less than an hour. I can use any size drive, any manufacturer, no worries. I use SyncBack Free to backup drives on a nightly basis.

The only useful time for RAID at home, would be if you need a drive larger than 4TB for a single volume (i.e. Windows Media Center only gives you one "recording" drive - if you save a lot of shows, and 4TB isn't enough, you need RAID to make a single volume).
 
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namdlo

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Typically most people will only post if they are upset...

The manufactures would go out of business if they had a 20-25% failure rate.

There is also the small amount of "DEU" errors - Defective End Users.

Of the drives you've listed I'd avoid the WD Red drives. They were a new design for WD that seemed to have failure issues.
 
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mouse24

mouse24

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Most people with working drives don't post about it. However the people with dead drives, yeah you get every single one.

Are you using a non raid config for your boot drive? (say an SSD or something) If so grab two of the red drives as they are the same price as that seagate one plus they were designed to be used in NAS/raid arrays so the warranty covers that. Speaking of warranty the seagate drive is at 2 year, red is at 3 and black is at 5 years. Though you pay + 50 bucks per drive for the black... The blacks are faster however.

With the money saved by going for the red drives instead of the blacks you could get an 120gb ssd which would be faster than any of those hdds even in raid 0.

Just a thought. I don't really know how reliable the seagate ones are but I'd personally just grab the red drives if I were you.
That being said I don't own any of the drives listed and I can't really give you much in the way of assurance in drive failure rates.
 
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jalfano85

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Thanks everyone for the feedback and the recommendations about the specific drives I mentioned. It was very helpful (namdlo, like your comment about DEU errors :) )

ronintexes, thanks for your suggestions. It gave me a lot to think about. I like the idea of an SSD for the OS and then one giant drive to back everything up, instead of RAID. I had a couple of follow-up questions:

1. When you said that when a drive fails in RAID you are down until you get a replacement drive, I can see how that is true for RAID 5. Is that also true for RAID 1 (mirroring)?

2. If I go with an SSD for the OS and I want to back that up, do I need to make an ISO image or do anything else special instead of a simple file copy? What would I need to do so that I could get the system going again if the SSD failed? Could I copy the OS backup or ISO image to an hard external drive or USB stick that I could boot off of if the SSD failed? After I've booted up of my emergency disk, how would I restore the OS on the new SSD - would I just copy files? Finally, to do all of this, should I use the Windows backup utilities, SyncBack Free, or something else?

Sorry for all of the questions but this is my first build and I am still on the rapidly-increasing part of the learning curve... Thanks for the help.
 
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popatim

popatim

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With any form of raid, except 0 where you lose the array if any drive fails, you have a certain amount of drives you can loose without losing the array. with raid5 its 1 drive, with raid 6 its 2.

With raid1 it dpends on how many drives are in the raid 1. A typical build is 2 drives where one mirrors the other and you can lose one drive without losing all your data. You can build raid1's with more that one mirror drives, for example a 4 drive raid one would have 3 drives mirroring one drive.

Once you lose a drive with raid you are in a critical state as, in most cases, another drive lost will mean losing all your data. When you replace the drive you will stay in this critical state until the array rebuilds. Depending on the size of the array a rebuild can take a long time, several days for large (3tb+) raid5's and 6's. During the rebuild your drives will be in almost constant use. This puts a heavy and long running load on your drives which is like a peak time to lose another drive. I'm not saying it will happen but you have to plan for it by having all that data backed up already.

 
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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Sorry for the late answer.

RAID should never be used in replacement for a backup. Even though the drives are "mirrored", if one fails, you aren't operational until it is replaced (you can leave the failed drive in, and access the data, but it will be very slow, and you may receive a lot of errors). RAID excels in the need for many spindles for large file servers, large databases, many users accessing data, and mission critical applications. For home use, the cost is usually prohibited, as you are spending 2X for a single drive. Backing up using SynchBack Free, you can choose how often you backup the data.

#2 - I would suggest using an ISO image of the SSD drive (you can store it on the backup drive), and periodically create a new one (every 30 days or so), to avoid having to install a ton of updates. You can create a bootable USB stick to rescue the system in the case of failure of the SSD (they are very reliable now), and put the application to restore the ISO to the new SSD.
 
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